The Company Union Movement, 1900–1937: A Reexamination

Abstract

The fostering of worker confidence in the organization has been a major goal of big business for a century. Professor Nelson, a well-known authority on the history of human resource management, here provides a new look at company unions. His view shows that the characterization of these organizations by liberal and labor critics was not always accurate. Some company unions represented noteworthy contributions to the development of a professional approach to labor relations.

Nonunion employee representation in the pre-Wagner Act years: A reassessment

“…The facts are just the opposite, however. As previously noted, the number of NERPs and employees covered by representation plans was higher in 1929 than ten years earlier (Nelson, 1982). Perhaps more remarkably, even during the darkest days of the Depression in 1931-1933, relatively few companies (at least the solvent ones) disbanded their NERPs even under the pressure of extreme financial exigency and a close-to-zero probability of union organization.…”

“…Nonunion employee representation, on the other hand, quickly sprang back --from 690,000 in 1922 to 1.5 million in 1928 (Nelson, 1982). It is this period of the 1920s that is most instructive and revealing with respect to the potentialities of nonunion employee representation for it was over this decade that leading employers refined and developed the new HRM paradigm, of which employee representation was a major component.…”

“…Company-established employee organizations, on the other hand, first appeared a century later. Hogler and Grenier (1992) claim that the first NERP was established in the late 1870s at the Straiton and Storm Co., while other accounts (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1937;Nelson, 1982) cite the Filene Cooperative Association, established by the Wm. Filene Sons Co. in Boston in 1898, as the first such organization.…”

“…Union membership, in contrast, was roughly three million. Over the next three years both forms of employee representation spread rapidly --union membership expanded by another two million people, while over 225 nonunion representation plans were established with coverage of over 400,000 workers (Nelson, 1982).…”

Did American Welfare Capitalists Breach their Implicit Contracts? Preliminary Findings from Company-level Data, 1920-1940

“…8 Houser (1927), pp.15-20;Slichter (1929), p.413;Nelson (1982). 9 The basic model underlying this framework is a repeated game with non-contractable human capital developed by Kanemoto & MacLeod (1989), which is modified and extended for the purpose of historical analysis.…”